The proliferation of computers and the maturing of the Internet have resulted in the Internet increasingly becoming a medium used to conduct online commerce involving the exchange of information, including personal information. For example, many consumers regularly engage in online banking or other online activities. Such activities often require the user to provide personal information, such as an account number, password, credit card number, etc.
The exchange of personal information over the Internet has also resulted in the propagation of a large number of “phishing” schemes that attempt to obtain a user's personal information through deceptive electronic communications. Phishing often involves the providing of a sham e-mail message or website (i.e., website page) to a user. For example, an e-mail message containing an HTML input form may be provided to a user, seeking to fool the user into submitting personal, financial, and/or password data. Other phishing techniques may involve displaying to the user a sham website page that replicates features of another, legitimate website page. The sham page may request personal information from the user, leading the user to believe that the user is providing information to a legitimate entity, when in reality, the user is providing the information to a phishing entity.